Holidays, like birthdays, will continue in human experience so long as they appear actual in belief. Their relative importance will diminish in proportion to the understanding of their metaphysical significance. Bells will chime to one and toll to another as the holiday spirit moves, since personal sentiment unwittingly accepts the message they convey as beyond human ability to change. The careless hand that grasps the bell rope sets hearts a-singing or a-sighing, and greetings will be gay or sad, sincere or deceitful, according to the vagaries of mortal thought. Notwithstanding the tremendous effort to invest the holiday season with cheer and happiness, misfortune limits, insincerity condemns, and time's Nemesis brings toil and turmoil, temptation and trouble. Righteous judgment thus becomes obscured, and the balance between human affection and spiritual integrity can be maintained only by a most determined struggle. Pictures of a feeble, bearded, scythe-bearing mortal, visions of swiftly falling sands in an hourglass seem to typify all the dread and fear of earthly existence. They are the ghosts of a disordered sense of time that have mesmerized people into forgetting man's birthright of immortality.
The clock face with its swinging hands is merely for temporary convenience. It can neither make a law nor govern the light. Mortal measurement cannot affect the circle of the sun or the immortality of man. To solve the problem of the stars, the years, or the universe, one must turn to God divine Principle, "for his name alone is excellent; his glory is above the earth and heaven." The enervating influence of the seemingly resistless round of daily tasks can be neutralized only by grasping the meaning of eternity. Whittier's wellknown known hymn emphasizes this vast difference in the viewpoint of time: —
That all of good the past hath had
Remains to make our own time glad,
Our common, daily life divine
And every land a Palestine.
